Planning Technical Sessions

evin and I just wrapped up an all day session that was filmed live called Knight's BI Summer School. While the session was only 6 hours on camera after you take out lunches and breaks, I thought it'd be an interesting blog post to talk about the 60 hours that were spent preparing for it. While I've been public speaking for well over a dozen years on technical topics, it never ceases to amaze me how I'm still trying to master it. It feels a bit like a finish line that constantly moves as you try to push yourself further and further. 

Recently, I've adopted a drastically different style to speaking and doing my slides based on the styles of Presentation Zen (Garr Reynolds). Nothing is a 100% fit so I've been tweaking my style over the past year to be a blend of his and my own. The style, much like Steve Jobs, is to limit your slide deck to visual accents, not merely transposing a Word Document and many do, including myself a while ago. The presentation should be about the demos and the words, not the slide deck. This should be done so much that some one else looking at the same deck may struggle to present it exactly you like by just looking at the deck. At a high-level, here are my personal rules:

1. People not slides - Uses your slides as an accent
2. No more than 6-10 words on a slide with a large image
3. Never put bullets in my slides - it constrains you into a box

Planning the Session

Even though the session was short, there was a ton of planning that goes into all the sessions. Once I know the audience, I whip out a pad of sticky notes where I plan the slide deck. I use sticky notes because if your message can't fit onto a sticky note, it needs to be broken into multiple slides and messages. Draw a picture of what you think would represent your message roughly then the few words you want to put on that slide. We had a lot of slides in our session but none of them had a complex message that took more than a minute to talk about. Going analog like this will allow you to be creative and see the flow of your session prior to even opening PowerPoint. 

Above each sticky note section was the theme of the section and who was going to be speaking on the topic.  The below picture shows you the actual ones from our session with just titles on it at this point and a few images like the tuples one. 

The final slide looks something like the below. As you can see, don't be afraid to fully use white space!

After this, you go to PowerPoint and start working on the actual images. I have a subscription to a stock photography site to bring in more professional images also. It takes much more time, but the outcome will be fantastic for the consumers of your presentation!